Recommended Wordpress themes for great SEO
-
Hi there, I'm trying to decide which theme to use. My main concern is if the theme has been built using a stable framework to ensure plugin compatibility for SEO. Also a general question, does the homepage need to have a certain amount of text content for SEO, or can other pages be SEO optimised with text / keyword? Some of the nicer themes seem to have a sparce text to image ratio on the homepage. I quite like this as an initial 'welcome' but worry this isn't great for SEO. Any suggested themes / advice will be welcome. Thanks
-
Hi,
Old thread, but wondering if you're able to generate an XML sitemap through Yoast with your Avada theme. There's an open thread on the Theme Fusion forum about the Yoast sitemap returning a 404 error. Just tried and I'm getting the same thing. Wondering if you came up with a workaround.
Thanks
-
Actually, I just finished a website design using Avada theme - strange coincidence! I just logged into the backend and the traffic lights are working fine. Have you used Yoast before? Avada works fine with Yoast - I just this minute confirmed that. PM me if you have difficulty but if you're entering your post, focus keyword, etc. then hitting Enter on the focus keyword, it should show. I just got a 'traffic light' green though, so it works.
-
Thanks everyone,
Appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions.
Matt, thanks for the reminder about comparison tools.
I'm new to Wordpress & after a some consideration opted for a Theme called 'AVADA' on Themeforest (http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/2833226). I think it looks great but I wasn't aware of the frameworks e.g. Genesis which Yoast mentions on his blog.
I've added Yoast SEO but the traffic lights don't all seem to work, e.g. content doesn't contain keywords, when the content clearly does. I thought this could be due to a conflict with AVADA not being on the Genesis et al frameworks, but I'm guessing here. There seems to be a general problem with Yoast not accurately displaying the results - anyone else find this and is there any suggestions?
I'm easing over to the Genesis framework to avoid issues. Bede you mention you don't get compatibility problems, ever used Themeforest or Themes outside of these frameworks?
Thanks again...
-
+1 for Yoast and the comments about it being more important than the theme. I've yet to encounter compatibility issues with the plugin, and we do a lot of development work in WordPress.
Personally, I think a decent paragraph of text is good to have on the homepage. That said, if you've got sub-pages that are more appropriate to your keywords, ranking them is most likely going to yield the best long-term results, even if it takes a bit longer.
-
I agree with Sara Thesis and Headway but I'd also recommend the Genesis Framework from Studiopress too.
As Matt stated the Yoast plugin is by far the best WordPress SEO plugin to use on your sites.
-
Thesis is a good theme with built in SEO advantages. Headway is great if you are looking for one with the most flexibility.
As Matt said, using Yoast and ensuring everything is set up important is just as important as picking a good theme (if not more)
-
I've had a number of clients ask me this lately and I keep going with the same advice. I recommend the Genesis framework (over Thesis for MANY reasons) and then I recommend making sure your layout is right. Title/logo H1, post titles and related headings H2, subheadings H3, etc.
Check any theme demo against the WC3 validator and Pingdom and run it on one of the many on-site analysis sites, such as http://www.woorank.com/
Once you've seen a demo you like that checks out on those 3 links, Wordpress is mainly a matter of Yoast's Wordpress SEO, a sitemap plugin if you don't like Yoasts. As far as the low text to image ratio, don't forget that most of the themes these days are customizable to let you add more text than you may see to the front page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Need Wordpress Front-end Plugin With Moz API
Hi Guys,
On-Page Optimization | | mrezair
I'm looking for Moz SEO Front-end Wordpress Plugin To Audit My Visitors Website And Show Results in my site. Like This plugin for Moz DA Checker: https://www.724ws.net/domain-authority-checker/ It's not important to be a free plugin or Premium one. I need to increase leads and traffic by it. Any suggestion will be appreciated.0 -
Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?
I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts. I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.
On-Page Optimization | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Favicons - favicon.ico having any SEO Benefits?
Hi all, I was wondering about favicon.ico and it's presence on the website. Is it important to have favicon.ico and there any SEO benefit of it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | vendrocks0 -
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO?
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Does Channeladvisor really assist in SEO?
I'm getting emails from Channeladvisor recommending I join, thereby taking advantage of a change to Google Shopping. It is starting in Australia from today (13Feb13). Is it an upgraded version of Google Adwords, or another form of a Commerce Merchant (obviously with multiple channels,e.g. Ebay, Amazon etc)? With Adwords, I found it too expensive for the type of product we sell (printer cartridges). But the real question is, DO MY RANKINGS DROP FROM NOT USING CHANNEL ADVISOR?
On-Page Optimization | | ABCPS0 -
SEO for Japan
Google and Yahoo are the two major search engines in Japan. You can search using Western characters, and you often see English language results with Japanese (Chinese) characters next to them. As I don't speak Japanese, how do I approach SEO for my Japanese-language site? would appreciate any experiences and educational sources on the topic.
On-Page Optimization | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
References and SEO?
Hi Everyone, I am really new to the SEO world (having come from paid search), so if this is a stupid question, I apologize. I noticed in Webmaster Tools that the top 25 keywords or so that Google thinks my site is about are keywords pulled from our references pages. Our site has a ton of authoritative content, most of which have corresponding reference pages with overlapping sources. Is this a problem? I am a little concerned that the keywords Google thinks are the most relevant to my site are really the least relevant. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks! nina
On-Page Optimization | | dirigodev0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0